


as thin of substance as the air

by saltstreets



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon-typical Edward Little whump, Canon-typical grimness, Canonical Character Death, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Confessions, Emotional Baggage, Haunting, Light Masochism, M/M, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:14:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27110077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltstreets/pseuds/saltstreets
Summary: He sees Jopson for the first time the next morning, after sleeping that first night at their final camp.
Relationships: Thomas Jopson/Lt Edward Little
Comments: 16
Kudos: 42
Collections: One Week of Terror 2020





	as thin of substance as the air

**Author's Note:**

> Written for today's One Week Of Terror prompt, "haunted"! Just a few thou words of Edward Little thinking about death and getting bullied by Thomas Jopson, who is dead at the time. As ya do.
> 
> I wanted to try out some stylistic things here, and that was fun to play with. Also Jopson is just so _enjoyable_ to write being kinda mean.
> 
> True, I talk of dreams,  
> Which are the children of an idle brain,  
> Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,  
> Which is as thin of substance as the air  
> And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes  
> Even now the frozen bosom of the north,  
> And, being anger'd, puffs away from thence,  
> Turning his face to the dew-dropping south.

It becomes clear almost immediately that this is to be their final camp. There is nothing different about the way they pitch the tents or arrange stones to make a fire pit, but Edward only has to cast a glance over the men to know that they will not be gathering themselves up to move again tomorrow morning. Something tremendous would be needed to move them from this spot that has, almost arbitrarily, become their destination, and Edward does not possess it. Even if he did, he is no longer their commanding officer in anything but a name on paper. There is no command here. Le Vesconte, who had initially urged them forward, doesn’t bother with anything more. He is sat by the little fire, distant and strange and saying nothing.

They share a tent, he and Henry. The men sleep tucked next to each other, under thin arms and pressed against hollow stomachs, hopeful that one of their fellows might still hoard a final coal of warm breath inside him, and that it might be shared. Edward does not sleep close to Henry. They sleep on opposite sides of the laughable officers’ tent, sequestered from each other as befits men of their status. One last joke about his meaningless rank: Edward must sleep alone, without what meagre warmth can be found in dead and dying men.

He sees Jopson for the first time the next morning, after sleeping that first night at their final camp. The first night of a now limited number. Jopson is sitting on the end of Edward’s bedroll in only his striped shirt, untucked from dirty trousers. At first Edward thinks that he is Le Vesconte, and opens his mouth to ask why Henry is sitting on his blanket- but Henry is gone from the tent already, and it is Jopson there.

Edward is on the ground sitting up but he still somehow manages to stumble in surprise. He blinks. Impossible. Jopson was among those they left behind many miles ago, too weak to even protest at his abandonment. The thought of it still grips Edward’s guts in a clawed fist. The men they fled from. Good men. The best of which is now improbably here in his tent.

Had Jopson found his strength again? Had he come after them?

Jopson stands. He has no shoes; his feet are in woollen socks on the cold ground. “So,” he says, and his voice is all tightly restrained politeness cut with a very harsh vintage of that particular brand of servile derision that had previously been reserved for officers admitting their inability to sew on a button or fold a shirt, “all your fine morals _did_ amount to nothing in the end.”

“What-”

“I believed I made my opinion on the matter clear enough but it would seem that the wishes of a third lieutenant don’t carry much weight. Or it is rather that they carry far more weight than desirable? The weight of three tents and a number of dying men, to be precise? Too _heavy_ for your backs, Lieutenant Little?”

The accusation scalds. It is the first warmth Edward has felt in- millennia. Oh God, he will blister before he freezes.

“I-”

“I saw you leaving. I managed to crawl out of the tent but you were already gone.”

“I had no choice,” Edward protests weakly even as something in him feels more alive than he has since those three pathetic tents had vanished behind the horizon. “I- I am no longer in any position to command. Le Vesconte and the others were leaving. I followed because I did not want to die. I still do not want to die.”

“How appropriate, because _I_ died, oh, two hours after you had left? Maybe I would have lasted longer if I’d stayed in the tent. But I didn’t want to be left behind.” Jopson’s accent has lost the smooth unobtrusiveness he usually kept so carefully polished. The vowels are rough and angry. Most everything about him is different. Faded. Decayed.

Even his eyes, which Edward had once so admired, are dull like those of a fish unsold in a market stand at the end of the day. A film covers them. Jopson is dead, that is clear. But an insubstantial kind of death. He is not transparent, but he is wispy all the same. Something around his edges suggests impermanence.

Edward is less horrified by the grim look itself than he is by the implication thereof. Were Jopson a figment of his imagination, Edward feels certain he would appear just as serenely unruffled as he always had done onboard _Terror._ Edward doesn’t think he would ever imagine Jopson so- so _adrift_ as he seems now. He doesn’t think so. Probably not.

But of course that puts this- apparition in the realm of the supernatural rather than the psychological. Which is impossible. Just as impossible as a great bear with the face of a man stalking them across the ice. Just as impossible as the most well-equipped expedition ever to be outfitted with all the might and science of the British Navy vanishing off the map and fading into the waste like so much linen forgotten and bleaching on an abandoned washing line.

Jopson snorts, jerking Edward out of his dazed musings. His mind pushes from its now near-permanent fog back into the current situation. “Nothing else to say, Lieutenant? But then you never were one for conversation.”

 _I used to be,_ Edward thinks, _I used to be almost cheerful._ He feels slightly crazed. He welcomes it even as he cringes from Jopson’s tone.

What will it be- what will Jopson next lay at his feet? In front of him, on the table. But instead Jopson sighs and- slumps, somehow, although he already seems such a caved-in oil portrait of a man that it is almost incredible for him to slump even further- and turns away. “Not that it would do anyone much good if you were,” Jopson says to the siding of the tent. “No good at all.”

Jopson looks terrible. The things he says are terrible. He is still the most handsome man Edward has ever seen and still strikes Edward with just the same tongue-tied confusion as he ever had when he had lived and been sparkling in his calm, sure motion and immaculate appearance.

Now he passes through the gap in the tent flap and is gone. Edward is left to stare wildly at the place he had been, eyes watering as he strains to see any indication of disturbance- has Jopson left? Had the tent flap parted for him as he went or had he simply passed through the canvas- had he even been there at all?

Jopson is always at the camp after that. Mostly just lurking about in a distorted mirror of his old habit of always drifting unobtrusively in the corner of wherever he was currently most needed, the perfect steward ready to step forward the moment any thought of his being required even floated unvoiced across the Captain’s mind.

Now he stalks, he hovers, he broods at the edges of Edward’s vision. Edward, first lieutenant to a missing captain: Edward, acting captain of nothing. Is this the fruit of such an ill-fated, unwanted promotion? With Crozier’s disappearance, has he come into possession of Crozier’s dead steward like some- some hellish adherence to the laws of naval hierarchy that must haunt him even now, at the end of everything?

Edward has always questioned and wondered and fretted. It had been a habit once. Now it is the only thing he _can_ do. He wonders how the leather of a boot can taste good- he wonders if it offers any nutrients whatsoever or only an illusion thereof, for peace of mind. He wonders why Jopson wavers ominously in the margins of the camp. He wonders if Jopson is only an illusion. For peace of mind.

He doesn’t speak to Edward again, and Edward begins to think that perhaps Jopson is all in his head after all. Ghosts and spirits: Edward does not believe in these things. Guilt and regret, however, are as intimate to him as any emotion.

He doesn’t speak to Edward, and as far as Edward knows he doesn’t speak to any of the men. He doesn’t interact with the camp, doesn’t sit on the upturned crates by the weak little cooking fire and doesn’t coil up the guy lines that fall in a limp tangle from each tent. Those tangled lines hurt Edward more than anything else. It is death, on a ship, to leave lines in a writhing knotted heap. But here they are sailing men no more. They are nothing.

Jopson doesn’t touch anything and he leaves no footprints when he walks upon the ground- and walk he does. Edward almost wishes he would float. The walking, the contact of socked foot upon shale offers a slight reality to Jopson that chills him. If Jopson floated he would be so far beyond Edward’s reach as to be just another disturbance in a disturbed end. But he walks.

Edward wishes Jopson would only shout at him. Insult him as he did that first day. Burn him away with words. At least it had been warm. There is a coal in Jopson, ghostly as he may be. Edward covets its heat dearly.

When Le Vesconte dies in the night and Edward wakes to see the man’s eyes frozen open, fixed in an accusatory stare from across the tent, he feels furious. It should be _him_ dead and gazing at Henry so resentfully- after all it was Henry who had talked him into abandoning those men and Henry whose fault it was that when Edward leaves this tent he will find Thomas Jopson’s last remnant immoveable and implacable out there to torment him another day with cold silence. How _dare_ Henry die and look at Edward with those eyes, as if he were to blame. How _dare_ he.

Edward turns over on his blanket that does nothing to mitigate the hardness of the ground or the sharpness of the shale, and goes back to sleep. If he doesn’t leave the tent, he will not have to see Jopson.

He wakes again however many hours later. Le Vesconte is still dead and Jopson is in the tent, sat on the ground not touching Edward’s bedding.

“I’m not truly angry with you,” Jopson says. He has not spoken to Edward since that first day he had appeared. He isn’t looking at Edward now. He is looking at Henry. The corpse of Henry. “I was at first, perhaps. But it isn’t your fault. There were greater things at play than you alone.”

“I regret it,” Edward says. “Please believe me.”

“I do.”

“I should have held my ground.”

Jopson shrugs. “What was there to hold on to? No, there’s no sense in blaming you for what was inevitable.” He smiles faintly. “After all, I _did_ die.” The smile vanishes as quickly as it had appeared, to be replaced with bleak sadness. “I just didn’t want to die alone.”

“I’m sorry. I’m- so sorry.” Edward tries to reach out, to what end he doesn’t quite know, only that he wants to touch, to hold. He wants Jopson’s fire back. He cannot deal with coldness. But Jopson leans away.

“Not a good idea, Lieutenant.”

Edward regards him hesitantly. Meekly. “Will you- vanish?”

Jopson shrugs again. “You know, I’m not entirely sure. Most likely. It doesn’t feel right.”

“I am sorry.”

“You were less than I wished you to be. But the last time I checked that wasn’t a hanging offence, nor even against the smallest of the Articles.”

Edward hadn’t known that Jopson had ever wished him to be anything at all.

The men are eating each other, and Edward can do nothing about it. Maybe he wouldn’t even want to do something if he could. He eats- of something- someone-

I am with it now, he thinks. I am with it now. Perhaps Jopson will appear to him, tall and made more substantial with condemnation. As a- as some avenging spectre. He would be more impressive in a long black robe, something from a Gothic woodcut, stark against the cold whites and greys from which he rose. Not that he wasn’t impressive enough without. Just in his shirt and woollen socks. Dirty and wrathful. The punishment for lieutenants who took no care to keep their buttons sewn on and their cuffs from trailing in the gravy. Edward waits in almost rapt anticipation as he- chews- for Jopson to appear and howl at him. To bring the real to the unreality. To turn Edward to smouldering charcoal again.

“You look ill. How are you?” Jopson finds him in the tent. Hiding? Is Edward hiding? No, he wants to be discovered. The body of Le Vesconte is gone. Edward knows and doesn’t think about where it is now.

“Guilty,” Edward says, dreamlike. “And I miss you.”

That gets him a small tilt of the head. Jopson watches him curiously. “Miss me?”

“I know it’s a foolish thing. We never knew each other particularly well. And the trappings of rank…I wish that you might have received your promotion in better times, on a better voyage. That we might have become friends.”

“Oh, _you_ wish that, do you?” Jopson’s voice is wry, but he doesn’t seem offended. “I wish it as well, funnily enough.”

“I think that is perhaps why you are haunting me.” The words fall from Edward’s mouth carelessly. This is what has been lurking in the recesses of his mind, waiting to be acknowledged, almost from the first time Jopson appeared to him. “I regret that we never had the time to become friends, because I loved you.”

“ _Loved_ me?!” Jopson nearly springs back, if an apparition could make any motion as sharply defined as a _spring_. Edward tries not to think of the movement as a _recoil_. His mind may be sick and dying, but surely it could not be so cruel as to find rejection even in this hallucination.

“Well,” Edward says hesitantly, “yes. I suppose.”

“I never knew.”

“I took great care that you never knew.” He is beginning to regret- again- speaking without thinking. Edward scrapes his fingers through the tangle of his hair. “I know what some lieutenants take as part and parcel of their rank. I never wanted you to feel that I- that I might want something of you. But I was- besotted. I suppose.” He laughs helplessly.

A first: Jopson seems at a loss for words. “ _Why?”_

Edward shrugs. “You were reliable. Stable. In everything. Even when the ship itself began tilting so severely a man could hardly walk the deck for sliding down it, you would stroll about as though you’d been born to walk on a diagonal.”

“But you never-”

“No. How could I even know if you were that sort of man yourself? The captain’s steward. The first lieutenant. It would have been outrageous to say anything.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. The outrageousness might have worked in your favour.”

“Very nice of you to say, Jopson, thank you. Precious sop for my conscience, ‘might have worked’.” Exhale. Edward sighs. “Sorry. I’m snappish.”

“It’s alright, I’m dead.”

Is he? “Are you?”

Jopson throws him a look that is so alike to Jopson in life, laughing to himself at some passing foolishness among the officer class that Edward almost weeps. “I would certainly say so.”

“I mean- I am not entirely certain that you don’t simply exist within my own head,” Edward tries to explain. “I’ve never believed in- hauntings.”

Jopson’s expression is increasingly wry. “That word again. I suppose that _is_ what this is, isn’t it. But now you mean to suggest that I’m a product of a tumultuous mind, rather than an unquiet spirit?”

Edward shrugs. Outside, the daylight is relentless. Somewhere in the tent, he can hear his watch ticking restlessly. “Oh, it may not even make a difference. You are here all the same. Spectres and hallucinations need to go somewhere, the same as the rest of us more solid creatures.”

Jopson smiles at him, as rare and unexpected and rich as an undisturbed night. Warm- as burning as Jopson’s anger- a smile- Edward wants it so badly he leans forward. “You should be snappish more often, Lieutenant,” Jopson says. “You’re almost eloquent when you’re snappish.”

“You know, I don’t think you have the right of it,” Jopson declares. Edward startles- he has dozed off without noticing. “To say that I am some sour dream conjured by your own imagination to torment you as you die. I wasn’t certain at first. But I feel now that I am myself, Little. A wraith, alright. Very well. But I am more than just a poorly digested piece of leather or pellet of lead.”

Strangely the thought is comforting all of a sudden, that Jopson might truly be an apparition rather than just a trick of an addled mind. Perhaps Edward is not as far gone towards death as he fears. It does, however, indicate that he is just as guilty for Jopson’s fate as he has always believed himself to be, if the man’s ghost has chosen him to haunt.

“It would made a terrible mess of things, that is a certainty.” Jopson is pacing in the tent. Edward is sat on a crate in the corner. He doesn’t remember what Jopson had been saying before this little flurry of agitation. “So thank you. That you said nothing.” He stops suddenly to stare at Edward. “But I’m dead, Little. And I never loved you. I’m sorry.”

Jopson is not in Edward’s imagination. Edward’s imagination is not cruel. Jopson is honest. “I know.”

“I might have been able to love you, who can know. If, as you say, it had been a kinder journey. Though a kinder world in its entirety might have been necessary for us. But I don’t know you as well as I might like, and I am dead. You abandoned me to die.”

“I know.”

“You would have been a terrible candidate to have an affair with.” Jopson speaks almost to himself. Edward may be- _is_ Edward just a spectral audience to him? Has he got it all backwards? Is Jopson the only living one left among them? Is Edward a minor player stood off to the side as attention turns to Jopson and his soliloquy, not even important enough to fully clear the stage beforehand-

“I can’t imagine you keep a secret very well,” Jopson is saying. “You would have gone to bits the minute you were confronted with what you were doing.”

Part of Edward wishes he could hate Jopson just slightly, for saying that. Maybe a braver man would have. But there’s some truth in it. Instead he basks in the fire like a salamander. “I know.”

“So you see why this puts me in a difficult position.”

Edward’s head has sank nearly between his knees. He swings it up now in puzzlement. “How do you mean?”

Jopson steps forward and kneels before him. It is the closest the apparition has ever come. He lifts his hands and falters for a moment, and it seems as though he had been about to rest them on Edward’s knees. He doesn’t, of course. But perhaps he had wanted to. “I never loved you. But hearing you say it, it almost makes me wish that I had.”

The heat of that simple statement is more than even Jopson’s harshest words. Edward is standing close to the locomotive nestled in Terror’s hold, he is sweating belowdecks with ice melting in his beard. He nearly chokes on the smoke rising from his own cindering lungs- _wish that I had-_

“Would you have-”

“Never. It would have been too risky, and I value my position too highly to have played with it like that, all for the sake of a quick frig in the dark.” Jopson pauses. “Well. Valued it.”

“Of course,” Edward says as if he isn’t slowly incinerating with the most glorious heat he has ever felt. The way that Jopson had said _never_ so immediately is somehow more thrilling than any yes could have been.

“You’re a handsome man, Little,” Jopson says quietly. “Even now.”

“And you’re still possibly a figment of my imagination fuelled by guilt and lead poisoning,” Edward returns, with far more cavalier confidence than he had ever possessed when speaking to Jopson alive, feeling shockingly in control for a tower of ash, “so you could probably stand to call me by my given name.”

That brings a smile to Jopson’s face, and for a second there is the hint of an infrequently-caught mischievous sparkle in his dull, filmy eye. “I suppose that we are also of the same rank.”

“Not quite, third lieutenant.”

“Would you quibble over that now? I thought you had just invited me to be familiar. Edward.”

“I would invite you to be more familiar than even that,” Edward says impulsively. “For all that I know you cannot.” He feels bold. Brazen.

“Oh, would you?”

“Many times over, Lieutenant Jopson.”

“I can be familiar.” Jopson’s voice is light and playful. Edward has never heard him so. And his imagination isn’t as good as all that, to invent a playful Jopson. “I can be very familiar if I choose.”

“And would you choose? If you had been given the invitation?”

“The question should rather be- could I ignore such an invitation, and let all the courage required for its offering go to waste?”

The courage- Edward has never been a particularly brave man. How much longer does he have? How much longer can he afford to shift away, avoid Jopson’s eye, curse himself at night in his bunk or on his blanket for saying nothing and doing less? Jopson is dead. Jopson is all in his head. Jopson is-

Jopson is bending down. He moves slowly, as if through water. Does he have trouble moving through the air, as intangible as he is? Or maybe he moves this way on purpose, like a man trying not to startle a wounded animal. Edward can barely breathe as Jopson places a kiss on his lips: light and insubstantial and Edward hardly knows if he is there at all, but it is _scorching_. His eyes flutter shut and the air in his lungs leaves him in a swoop. A house on fire- glass windows shattering- _Thomas,_ he thinks-

When he opens his eyes again Jopson is vanished. A few motes of dust filter lazily through the light coming through the tent flap, undisturbed and inattentive to the apparition that had stood in their way just seconds before.

Outside the day is quiet, and cold.


End file.
